It was May, 1985, and I stood in my kitchen repeating my finance professor’s words, “You’re all in this for the money, aren’t you?” Mimicking the class response, I raised my arms, hooted and stomped my feet -- because I had just graduated from business school and been offered a job in stocks and bonds at the Premier City National Bank. Smirking at my compounding fortune, I kicked my salesgirl pumps high into the air. Never again would I have to sell those danged Cutco Knives door-to-door. Or badger deadbeat customers to pay up. Giddily I whooped, “Get goin’, girl!”

Padre Hilberto sat in the confessional, knowing he should feel eager and generous about hearing Señora Ottilia Garza’s disclosures, and regretting he could not. He smelled her familiar onion breath through the screen and heard her familiar complaints. She mumbled on and on about her husband’s sin: his drunkenness and his long-term affair with Gloria, a girlfriend he had known before he married. Hilberto remembered to Uh-huh every once in a while, but after hearing her repetitions every week for ten years, he had given up trying to get the señora to talk of her own sins. And he was more than bored with her husband’s—that man never did anything new.

The Horseman ~ El Jinete

Juan sat before his small house and watched the black night. He leaned forward, peered at the dim ranch land and listened intently. He heard the wind blowing. He heard the stomp of a hoof from over near the barn. That stomp was his horse Morena, signalling that she too had heard. There was something out there. Something different.

Like a Bird She Could Not Catch

On a fall day that could have been like any other but was not, Gwen parked her Ford truck on the dusty shoulder of a lonely road just past a little clapboard house. She slid out of the seat and closed the door, then peered in the window. Yes, the keys were still in the ignition. Yes, the truck was unlocked. Anyone who needed the truck or something inside could get in. Knowing that made her insides feel better. Her empty hands stretched out wide, next reached up high toward the last full light, then came gently down.

Inside Out

This new story coming soon!

Hanging Laundry

Out on the patio, Susan was hanging laundry because it was the right thing to do. She hung laundry on most days, in a modern time when Americans did not hang laundry. But she did, because she had been a 30’s girl in the 70’s, now was a 70’s girls in the 21st century, always forty years behind the fashions. And there sitting watching her like on so many other mornings, was that woman. Susan remembered the saying: Careful whom you marry, for you marry your in-laws, too. From years of experience, she corrected that saying: You marry the ex-wife, too. . .